Happy Halloween!

Well, well, well I could throw out a million excuses and reasons for not updating this. Let’s just say it was a combo of many things. Things have been really busy and exciting around here. I’ve been doing some traveling and diving into the culture. This past weekend we had Halloween and Dia de Los Muertos and Dia de los Santos. Obviously Mexicans don’t celebrate Halloween but it’s volunteer tradition to organize activities on Halloween. It was so much fun. I took charge of the Haunted House. I ended up making a Haunted Walk in a really dark scary field where they keep the buses for the school. Pretty much every kid under the age of 12 left crying and a few even had to be carried out. The big accomplishment was successfully scaring the middle school boys. Everyone had a good time scaring and I was just happy that my first big activity that I took on was so successful. As for the actual Mexican holidays Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead Nov. 2nd) and Dia de los Santos (All Saints Day Nov 1st) it was fun to get to participate and it’s a really good weekend in the house. In Mexican culture the feast day of your Saint is much more important that your birthday and it’s a huge celebration. Now of course since we have around 800 kids it would be impossible to celebrate all of their Saint days individually so we do all of the kids on All Saints Day. We started at 5am in kinder with singing Las Mananitas which is pretty much our equivalent of Happy Birthday. We wake the kids up singing and with the house band playing the song. We went section to section until all the kids in the house were woken up and sung to and then everyone eats cake and hot chocolate. Yeah, cake at 7am. Then the kids get the whole day free to do whatever they want. No one gets punished, there are no chores, and they have no set schedule. This is a huge deal. This is the only day in the year that they get this.

Then the following day is Day of the Dead. We had a huge mass and every section in the house made an ofrenda. An ofrenda is an offering to the dead as they believe here that this is the one day a year that the spirits of dead loved ones can come back. On a typical ofrenda there are the most popular food dishes, tequila, salt, water, fruit, candles, and gold and purple flowers. Then anything that this specific dead person loved. There is a house wide competition and 1st and 2nd place get a trip to the movies for the whole section. I spent all day doing our ofrenda and it paid off as my section got 2nd place. Of course the kids couldn’t help as mine are too young, but that doesn’t really matter. It was exciting and quite an experience.

There of course have been all sorts of other things that I have been up to, but you can only suffer to read so much in one sitting. Upcoming I’m going on an EDGE retreat next weekend and will be leading my own small group in Spanish. EDGE again is the middle school LifeTeen program. I’m really psyched. As you all know I’ve been on a lot of LifeTeen retreats but I’ve never been a CORE member for one. I’ll let you know how it goes. Also some really good news I have received is that the fam is going to wait and do Christmas when I come home. This makes me really happy. We are doing a Thanksgiving dinner in Cuernavaca for all the volunteers. I'm making pies...my speciality.

Here are some new strange Mexican things I have encountered:

Day Light Savings Time- I realize this isn’t just a Mexican thing. It’s more of an all over thing, but having lived in Arizona my whole life I’ve never experienced it first hand. It’s pretty weird and definitely throws you off for a day

Now that the weather is cold we eat things like soup and spaghetti for breakfast…this is very odd.

The house is in a crisis and as such they turn off all the power and gas during the day in all places where there aren’t refrigerators between the hours of 6am-4pm. Yeah, this means cold showers.

I still hand wash my clothes. Lets just say I can tell that clothes these days are not built for this kind of washing as my clothes slowly but surely are falling apart.

I have learned to sew and to do it pretty well I might add.

I made a chocolate cake from scratch with my sons from the medianos section (the section for boys ages 8-10). I've made a cake from scratch, but I also made the frosting from scratch. It turned out really good. I couldn't believe that I actually made it.

Mexico City might be really bad for your lungs because of all the pollution, but its really awesome. It’s one of my favorite descansos (weekend off) I have spent here.

More to come I promise. I'm going to shoot for weekly updates but I'm going to get a new blog as this one will not allow to upload pictures and I have about 800 more since I last updated and they are things that you all need to see. My kids are just way too adorable. I'm way attached now. I have at least 20 kids who I refer to as my "hijos" which means son/daughter.

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